One occurrence that every manufacturer dreads is a product recall. So much hard work developing and releasing a product, as well as marketing it, can be eroded with a single instance.
A recent ETQ survey found that 73% of respondents endured a product recall in the last five years and 48% said there have been more recalls than there were five years ago. Clearly the quest to eliminate poor product quality remains constant. Meanwhile, the cost of poor quality continues to rise among today’s manufacturers, not only causing severe financial impact from product recalls, defects and noncompliance, but also eroding the trust of customers and damaging industry reputation.
Automate quality processes
In our continuing mission to help customers deliver optimal quality and drive down the various costs of poor quality, ETQ, which is part of Hexagon, launched its new Inspection Management application this summer. The new app is designed to automate and streamline in-process quality inspection procedures. Now manufacturers who use hands-on inspections to meet quality standards and compliance requirements can automate these processes, reduce paperwork, minimize the cost of rectifying quality issues and enable real-time visibility into quality operations – all within ETQ Reliance®, a fully integrated quality management system (QMS).
The ETQ Inspection Management application creates a framework to manage hands-on inspection planning and execution, as part of a company’s overall inspection mix across the entire manufacturing lifecycle. This is critical because it is always easier and less expensive to fix an issue as early as possible. In the Inspection Management application it is possible to do just that by identifying issues sooner and resolving them faster by automating submission of any issues to quality events, nonconformance reporting and corrective action processes. It also provides a central repository for shop floor data for analysis and continuous improvement throughout the manufacturing process. This capability helps quality professionals and operations managers eliminate paperwork, consistently and prescriptively conduct quality inspections, maintain revision control of inspection plans and streamline communications across the organization.
Today most manufacturers use a mix of inspection methods, tools and technology to assess and monitor quality throughout a manufacturing process. Some inspections are based on high-volume automated data collection methods, and some involve lower volume hands-on data collection. Effectively, the Inspection Management app creates another avenue for ETQ Reliance to automatically ingest valuable shop floor data – along with SPC-generated quality alerts (e.g., Hexagon Q-DAS integration) and other shop floor technology – and centralize quality data collection and analysis. Hexagon’s metrology and SPC product offerings are a natural fit for the ETQ Reliance Inspection Management application and represent a further expansion of embedded quality management on the shop floor, where quality events are easier and less costly to remediate.
Because ETQ Reliance supports modern web services APIs which makes integration with other enterprise systems efficient and seamless, all the data collected by Inspection Management from various shop floor inputs can be collected, centralized and shared with other enterprise systems, such as ERP and MES. Further, ETQ Reliance enables communications with a broad set of stakeholders in the manufacturing lifecycle — other factories around the world, design and engineering departments, supply chain partners and analysts and decision makers in other corporate functions. Sharing information about issues and resolutions eliminates systemic problems and enables global best practices.
Getting ahead of the game
Outside of the immediate benefit of identifying and remediating quality issues sooner and at less cost, the integration of shop floor data from multiple sources within the Inspection Management application and ETQ Reliance brings quality control from a standalone process into a fully closed-loop ecosystem for continuous quality improvement. With this consolidated and shareable data in hand, quality leaders can more readily identify global quality trends and, potentially, use this data as part of a predictive quality analytics platform to identify quality issues before they occur.
Shaping reality through data
When Hexagon chose ETQ to become a pivotal element of our long-term strategy, we did so for many reasons, but largely because we both embraced a shared vision of a data-driven future for making smarter business and operational decisions. Together, we are building digital bridges that connect the islands of automation on the manufacturing line with the decisions made in the C-suite and every place in between. From the shop floor to the board room, we’re helping the outputs of automated, data-enabled quality management evolve into powerful business process management solutions that impact the entire organization. The recent launch of ETQ Reliance Inspection Management application is an important element of that bridge and we look forward to helping customers continue to extend their quality journey and better integrate their manufacturing ecosystems to deliver a strong and lasting competitive advantage.
Consult an expert to learn more about how the ETQ Reliance Inspection Management application can help spot quality issues sooner and resolve them faster and at less cost.
